Oh boy, the press is not getting copies of Mary Trump’s book and various reviews are coming out and ALL are very damning. This is going to rattle T a LOT…and KellyAnne is trying to give cover for him…and projecting about her own daughter’s revealing of what is going on in their family.
The Daily Beast links to Wapo and NYT - gives a lot of excerpts.
“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” Mary bluntly declares in the book. “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with complicity, silence, and inaction from his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”
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“He’s a clown,” Maryanne allegedly confided in her niece. “This will never happen again.
Mary Trump paints a disturbing portrait of her uncle, saying he paid a friend to take his SATs so he could get into college and grew up bending the truth to promote himself. The future president’s father was a “high-functioning sociopath” and his mother “emotionally and physically absent.”
“Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable. He continues to be protected from his own disasters in the White House,” writes Mary Trump, the daughter of the president’s eldest brother, Fred.
“But now the stakes are far higher than they’ve ever been before; they are literally life and death. Unlike any previous time in his life, Donald’s failings cannot be hidden or ignored because they threaten us all,” she adds.
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Fred Jr., often called Freddy, had been expected to take over the family real estate business, but he was uninterested and Fred Sr. ended up favoring Donald instead.
“Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father,” Mary writes. “I can’t let him destroy my country.”
She writes that no family members went with Freddy when he was taken to the hospital at the end of his life. On the night he died, Donald went to the movies, she writes.
Donald is the fourth of five siblings, and their parents were “problematic,” Mary writes.
Their mother, also named Mary, was “emotionally and physically absent,” and Fred was worse, she argues.
“Fred seemed to have no emotional needs at all,” the book says. “In fact, he was a high-functioning sociopath.”
Because of this, “Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life,” the book says, and he developed personality traits that included “displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity.”
He also became practiced at bending the truth, a precursor to a president who has uttered falsehoods and mistruths thousands of times since taking office.
“For Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was,” Mary writes.
Trump got his older sister, Maryanne, to complete his school homework, and he paid a friend to take the standardized College Board admission tests known as SATs for him, according to the book.
“That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records,” Mary writes. “Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.”
When Fred Jr. failed to meet his father’s expectations, Fred Sr. treated him harshly, an experience that Donald internalized.
“He had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate his older brother and Freddy’s resulting shame,” Mary writes. “The lesson he learned, at its simplest, was that it was wrong to be like Freddy: Fred didn’t respect his oldest son, so neither would Donald. Fred thought Freddy was weak, and therefore so did Donald.”
The book is the first from a member of Trump’s family, but several former senior members of Trump’s inner circle have shared withering criticism of the president as he seeks reelection.
What Mary Trump leaked to the NYT - the family taxes